Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Flash
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 | Qwen: Qwen3.6 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | mistralai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 53.0 | - |
| Input Price | $1.50/M | $0.19/M |
| Output Price | $7.50/M | $1.12/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 209,715 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 49.4 | - |
| ai_index_agentic | 31.3 | - |
| ai_index_coding | 77.4 | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.6 Flash costs $0.47 and Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $3.38, so Qwen3.6 Flash is about 7.2 times cheaper for the same work.
Qwen3.6 Flash reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Mistral Medium 3.5.
Only Qwen3.6 Flash offers video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Mistral Medium 3.5 scores higher on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Qwen3.6 Flash on 4 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Bulk Data Labeling and others).
Pick Mistral Medium 3.5 if you need the stronger all-round task scores; pick Qwen3.6 Flash if you need lower cost, long documents or video input.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 | Qwen: Qwen3.6 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 153 | 133 |
| Code Review | 147 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 116 | 131 |
| Code Refactoring | 144 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 155 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 140 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 128 | 119 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 132 | 120 |
| Frontend Component Design | 137 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 151 | 124 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 142 | 133 |
| ETL Scripting | 138 | 128 |
| JSON Extraction | 134 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 123 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 139 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 139 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 141 | 137 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 119 | 123 |
| Blog Post Writing | 129 | 121 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →